My latest brainwave!

It just so happened that I had a couple of bottles of gin, that'd I'd got when they were on offer in the local supermarket.

Now the first thing that came to mind was "Sloe Gin".

So off I went, to the local Home brew shop. He did have dried sloes, as I'd stupidly managed to miss the sloe season. Unfortunately, they looked a bit manky and I wasn't sure. So I decided to modify the recipe (recipe ? well just the faintest fucking idea really), instead of sloes, I went for dried elderberries. They looked a bit less manky in the packet, even though they were about £1 or so dearer than the sloes. I got a 500 gramme bag of them.

At home, I took the 2 bottles of gin, the 500 gm's of elderberries and 1lb of sugar (the thinking being that because the elderberries are naturally sweeter than sloes, they wouldn't need so much sugar) and placed them into an empty 2.25 litre jar (formerly used for cider I think).

They came up to the top, leaving a nice 1 to 1.5 inch air space (oh this was last saturday).

It's taken till today, for all of the sugar to be dissolved, despite me giving it a good shake twice a day.

So now, it looks for all the world, that I've got 2.25 litres of very concentrated blackcurrant cordial. I think that I've fucked up a bit, I'll have to correct this. I think I'll have to get it out of the small jar and put it into a 4.5 litre demi-john jar and top it up with gin.

I suspect that 500 grammes of elderberries was a bit too much - I don't know how much I should have used, but not that much.

Ah well, it should still turn out OK. If I can, I'll get some pictures and post them so you can see.

TTFN